By Rich Lowry
Monday, April 28, 2008
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has taken Barack Obama's critically acclaimed
race speech in Philadelphia, ripped it into bits and tossed it in the
air to serve as confetti for his parade through the media.
In that speech, Obama said Wright had been taken out of context, a
defense the pastor has made himself. If only we knew the true Wright,
Obama complained, instead of just "the snippets of those sermons that
have run on an endless loop on the television and YouTube." In his
interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, Wright said the playing of his
sound bites was "unfair," "unjust" and "untrue."
Then cometh the good reverend to step all over the out-of-context
defense in a speech at the National Press Club. He defended his
"chickens come home to roost" statement about 9/11 in exactly the same
terms as in his original sermon: "You cannot do terrorism on other
people and expect it never to come back on you." He stood by his
damnation of America and his contention that the U.S. government had
created AIDS: "I believe our government is capable of doing anything."
For good measure, he dishonestly denied Louis Farrakhan's infamous
denunciation of Judaism as a "gutter religion" and called him "one of
the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century." The more
Wright talked, the more he sounded like a Christian Farrakhan.
Near the end of his majestically awful performance, he corrected
reporters, telling them that Obama "did not denounce me. He distanced
himself from some of my remarks." About this at least, Wright was
sober and precise. "I can no more disown him than I can disown the
black community," Obama said in Philadelphia. At the Press Club,
Wright similarly insisted that the attacks on him were an attack on
the "black church."
Obama and Wright thus slander both the black community and black
church. As Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center
reports in the latest National Review, Trinity United Church of Christ
"is arguably the most radical black church in the country." Its black
liberation theology has been rejected by mainstream black churches, a
source of frustration for its adherents. This theology is at the root
of all that Wright says, so the "context" is as radical as his highly
publicized fulminations.
James Cone, the founder of black liberation theology, forged a
worldview mingling Malcolm X-style revolutionary black nationalism and
Third World Marxism with prophetic Christianity. He calls it "a
theology which confronts white society as the racist anti-Christ." In
a war against "white values," black pastors must -- as Wright has --
reject "white seminaries with their middle-class white ideas about
God, Christ and the church."
When Wright came to Trinity Church in Chicago in the 1970s -- invited
to give the worship a more black inflection and foster stronger ties
to the community -- the middle-class parishioners who had beckoned him
left when they got a dose of his radicalism. The national United
Church of Christ denomination considered distancing itself from the
Wright-led church. Yet Obama came -- and stayed.
In search of an identity and a community, Obama found it in Trinity,
where he was converted by Wright's signature "Audacity to Hope" sermon
and its black-liberation themes of the suffering of blacks merging
with that of the ancient Israelites (not to be confused with today's
condemnable Israelites). Obama can't be begrudged his youthful
initiation, but remaining at the church for two decades? Wright is a
canker on his candidacy, raising questions about who he really is and
about his honesty.
In a slippery dance, Obama maintains that he was thoroughly shocked by
Wright's original radioactive statements and hadn't heard him say such
things, although he did hear other (always carefully unspecified)
"controversial" things. The threat to Obama as the paladin of the "new
politics" is that, as he dodges and distances on Wright, people will
come to agree with his former pastor's newly dismissive evaluation:
"He says what he has to say as a politician."
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